


The Never-Puts-Down-the-Phone Cure

by scioscribe



Category: Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle Series - Betty MacDonald
Genre: Gen, Humor, Modern Era, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-08-19 10:47:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16533098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle is here for today's parents.





	The Never-Puts-Down-the-Phone Cure

**Author's Note:**

  * For [plumeria47](https://archiveofourown.org/users/plumeria47/gifts).



It was a scorcher of a July day.  If you are lucky enough to live in a place where every home has the efficient hum of central air, then you may not know how overwhelming summer days can be.  The Beeker-Beckers, however, lived in a very old house. It had been built in Victorian times. It had gingerbread trim, an enormous wraparound porch, an upstairs balcony, and a library with a ladder that slid across the floor.  But it did not have air conditioning.

That July morning saw the Beeker-Beckers sitting around their kitchen table grousing about the heat.

“I don’t understand why we can’t just put up a few little window units,” Mr. Beeker said.

“Because it’s a historical home,” Ms. Becker said in the tone of someone who had had to say this many times before.  “There are too many little rooms and hallways. We’d have to buy a dozen window units, and then we would become such an eyesore that the Historical Society would have us all arrested.”

Ms. Becker had said this hoping to make her daughter laugh.  Colleen Beeker-Becker and her mother had always gotten along very well.

This morning, though, Colleen didn’t even look up from her phone.  She was chewing on a piece of her hair. On her screen was a little green monster that was bouncing up and down.

“Colleen?”

“Mm,” Colleen said distractedly.

Ms. Becker looked at Mr. Beeker, who met her eyes and sighed in such a dramatic and world-weary way that they both began to laugh.  They had both complained before about the amount of attention Colleen gave her phone. By now it felt like all they could do was commiserate with each other about it.

“Well, it’s too hot for a real breakfast,” Mr. Beeker said decisively.  “I have some Italian ices in the freezer. Real fruit,” he added with a wink, “so it’s even healthy.  We can eat them out on the porch so we’ll catch the breeze and then, if it sounds good, we could all go see a movie.  Steal someone else’s A/C, that’ll show ’em.”

“That sounds incredible,” Ms. Becker said.  “Who are the people we’re showing, again, dear?”

“I’m not sure,” he admitted.  “The Historical Society, I suppose.  They think they’ll drive us out, but we won’t be beaten.”

She and Mr. Beeker took their Italian ices and went out onto the front porch.  They left Colleen’s beside her placemat, hoping she would realize it was there and join them.

But it was half an hour before Colleen came out onto the porch.  “What are you doing out here? And why did you put a melted Popsicle by where I was sitting?  I opened it up and it squished everywhere and almost got all over on my phone.”

“Oh no,” Ms. Becker said.  “What a terrible tragedy that would have been.”

“We were right there at the table with you,” Mr. Beeker pointed out.  “We said what we were going to do.”

“Well, you knew I wasn’t paying attention!”

Colleen went back into the kitchen, poured the slushy remains of her Italian ice into a bowl, and carried it back out onto the porch.  She ate it with a plastic spoon while she checked things on her phone.

“It’s supposed to be really hot all day today,” she said.

“No kidding,” Mr. Beeker said.

Ms. Becker, remembering the little girl who had badgered her into playing endless games of parcheesi and Mario Kart and dress-up, decided to try to reach out and repeat herself.  She spoke loudly, as though the problem were Colleen’s hearing. “Colleen, your father and I thought we could all go see a movie. It would give us a chance to sit somewhere nice and cool for a while.  Is there anything you’d like to see?”

Colleen didn’t know what she wanted to see.  She was online most of the day, but she seldom read an entire article start-to-finish.  Her head was a blur of headlines: everything that was good was secretly bad and everything that was bad was secretly good.  She didn’t know what the right choice would be, and she had to choose the secretly right thing, because otherwise her friends would tease her about her status updates.  She created a quick Twitter poll: _What movie should I see?_

“This has gone quite far enough,” Ms. Becker said, mostly because it was something she had always wanted to say.

Mr. Beeker seemed impressed with it.  He gave her a deep nod.

Between the two of them, they chose a movie.  In the sole interest of protecting their only child from heat-stroke, they shepherded Colleen along with them to the theater.  The whole ride there, her eyes stayed glued to her phone.

Mr. Beeker despaired.  With as little attention as she paid when anyone was driving, his daughter wouldn’t even be able to find her way around a corner.  And he shuddered to think about her being old enough to drive. He said as much to Ms. Becker.

“She’ll have a GPS, of course,” Ms. Becker said.  “It’s on the phone, thankfully, so she’ll know it’s there.”

“And then she’ll never look up from it,” Mr. Beeker said darkly.  “We are raising a future vehicular manslaughter suspect.”

They were settled down in their seats in the theater when Colleen announced that she had decided what movie she wanted to see.

“You’re seeing whatever movie is going to play on this screen,” Ms. Becker said.  “The enormous screen in front of you, not the little one in your hand. You can’t take half an hour of dilly-dallying to make a decision.”

“I had to find out what everyone thought!”

“You’re going to have to learn to make your own decisions,” Ms. Becker said, before realizing that this moral did not entirely square with the two of them making Colleen sit through a movie she had not, in fact, chosen to see.  She reverted to a classic. “If all your friends voted that you should jump off a bridge, would you?”

“Probably,” Colleen said.

“At least she’s honest,” Mr. Beeker said.

The movie started.  Despite bearing a grudge against their daughter that morning, Mr. Beeker and Ms. Becker had been careful to choose a movie they thought Colleen would enjoy.  They wanted to draw her out into participating in the family again.

The story was engrossing and involved two aliens falling in love.  Mr. Beeker, who always cried at movies, started sniffling halfway through.  Ms. Becker took his hand in hers comfortingly. She was about to lean over and softly whisper in his ear that she had heard the movie had a happy ending when a bright white glare suddenly popped up in the corner of her eye.

There were grumbles in the seats behind them.

Colleen, oblivious, went on texting her friends.

Ms. Becker and Mr. Beeker were proud to have their names engraved on two seats of the local non-profit theater.  (Though that was not the theater they were currently in: they both found it very difficult to watch art films on hot days.)  They were quietly aghast that anyone of their blood would stoop to using her phone during a movie. Mr. Beeker privately thought that he would rather suddenly find out Colleen had two young children somewhere he hadn’t known about, and was checking in urgently with their babysitter, then have her be playing rudely with her phone at such a time for no reason at all.

Ms. Becker reached over and covered her daughter’s screen.  “Off and in your purse,” she said in a low voice. “You’re distracting people.”

Colleen was a sweet girl, and she blushed to realize that she had started doing something so absentminded.  She put her phone away at once. But she didn’t turn it off—it was unthinkable to her that anyone should turn their phone off when it could be so laggy starting up again.  Parents didn’t understand that you could put your phone in Do Not Disturb mode. Now it wouldn’t make any noise.

She tried to watch the movie, but since she had been off and on her phone ever since the start of it, she couldn’t follow what was happening.  Ten minutes later she had her hand down in her purse and was trying to take Buzzfeed quizzes with one thumb without _actually_ taking her phone out.

It still made a night-light like glow in the theater.  The Beeker-Beckers, embarrassed and not wanting to continue ruining anyone else’s good time, excused themselves, escorting Colleen out with them.

The ride home was very quiet.  Mr. Beeker was bad-tempered because he hadn’t gotten to see the happy ending.  Ms. Becker was bad-tempered because she had had to leave the air conditioning early.  They were both bad-tempered because their daughter seemed to have her phone surgically attached to her hand.  Colleen was sulky because she could sense everyone was mad at her but didn’t think they ought to be. She sent out a group text about it to all her friends.

The Beeker-Beckers were at their wits’ end.  They both spent the evening calling their old friends to find out how their friends dealt with _their_ children’s phones.

“Well,” Annemarie Couscous said to Ms. Becker, “I’m afraid I can’t help you.  Anastasia Lucia doesn’t use her phone at all. Why, once she even left it in an old coat she was donating and the thrift store people had to bring it back to us.”

“But how did you get her to cut back on it?” Ms. Becker said.

“We didn’t do a thing.  She stopped herself the moment we got her Google Glass.”

Ms. Becker decided that she had never had a high opinion of Annemarie Couscous’s intelligence.  “I think,” she said slowly, “that Anastasia Lucia might be doing all the same things Colleen is doing, only now with her new Google Glass.”

“I hadn’t thought about that,” Ms. Couscous admitted.

“No, I’m sure you hadn’t,” Ms. Becker snapped.  She hung up.

Mr. Beeker, meanwhile, was talking to his old friends Mr. Prince and Mr. Kwan, who had a son about Colleen’s age.

“Ezra used to be horrible about his phone,” Mr. Kwan said.

Mr. Beeker brightened.  “But he’s not anymore?”

“No,” Mr. Prince said.  “We threw it in a lake.”

“That seems a tad excessive,” Mr. Beeker said.  “Didn’t you just have to get him a new one?”

“We did,” Mr. Kwan admitted.  “But we just keep throwing them in the lake.  I’m not sure it’s good for the fish.”

“I’m very sure it’s not,” Mr. Beeker said.

But after several phone calls, Ms. Becker finally struck gold.

She had called her friend Ms. Everheart, who was always sensible, or who at least always seemed sensible because she did not have children herself and spent her life doing dangerous aerial acrobatics, which by this point Ms. Becker thought would be better for her blood pressure.  Ms. Everheart had an enormous collection of nieces and nephews and seemed to always be finding new ones under her sofa cushions. They all adored her because she let them run around the house eating fudge and peanut brittle and black sesame mochi and playing with her model airplanes.  Ms. Becker was sure Ms. Everheart would be able to drag some erstwhile relation up by the ankle and make them confess how they had gotten over being addicted to their phone.

“You’ve come to the right place,” Ms. Everheart said.

“Oh, I knew I had,” Ms. Becker said gratefully, deciding not to mention to Ms. Everheart that this was her sixth phone call of the evening.  It took a certain amount of frustration and white wine to convince someone that an aerial acrobat was a person they should ask for childrearing advice.

“Nearly every single one of my nieces and nephews has spent some time going around with their phones stuck to their hands.  And now none of them do.”

“And not because they have Google Glass?  Or because their parents are throwing their phones in the lake?  Or because they’ve joined a community that doesn’t allow anything newer than the buggy?  It’s been a very long night.”

“None of those things,” Ms. Everheart said crisply.  “They use their phones sometimes and then sometimes they do not.”

Mr. Beeker, who was hanging onto every word of this, said, “Ask her if she only means when they’re sleeping.”

“She doesn’t only mean when they’re sleeping,” Ms. Becker said.

“If Colleen is getting to the point where she does nothing but play with her phone,” Ms. Everheart said, “you should look up Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle.”

“Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, of course!”  Ms. Becker slapped her forehead. “I should have thought of that ages ago.  My parents went to her when I wouldn’t stop lying about brushing my teeth, and she used to babysit Colleen sometimes when Colleen was very small.  I suppose I thought she must have died.”

But Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, Ms. Everheart assured Ms. Becker, had not died at all, not even a little.  She was still living in her little upside-down house and she still smelled like fresh-baked sugar cookies and she still understood children better than anyone else in the world.

They called up Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle the very next day.

“Of course I remember Colleen,” Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle said warmly.  “It’s been a long time since I’ve spoken to her, but I still see her on Facebook sometimes.”  Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle was the age of everyone’s grandmother and therefore had a tidy little Facebook page with many pictures of babies and stories about nice things people had done for strangers.  She was also speaking to them through Skype because she always loved to see everyone’s faces when she spoke to them. She thought Skype was the best invention humanity had thought of in a good long while.

“I’m surprised you don’t see her on Facebook _all_ the time,” Mr. Beeker said tartly.

Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s kind face wrinkled into a friendly smile.  “Ah, I see. Colleen has come down with a bad case of never-puts-down-her-phone-itis.”

“I think it’s called screen addiction now,” Ms. Becker said.

But Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle shook her head.  “Oh, I don’t think it’s as serious as that.  Don’t let the problem seem too big for you to handle.  Just tell me about what she’s been like lately.”

They recounted the entirety of yesterday and much of the last few months.  Once they started talking, it was hard to stop. It was rare for someone to specifically invite parents to complain about their children, and as much as they both adored Colleen, Mr. Beeker and Ms. Becker had to admit they found it a little cathartic to say dreadful things about her.

“She’s a very good girl,” Ms. Becker said.  “We’ve taken her phone away before, for a few hours or even a few days, and yes, she sulks a little bit at first, but then she buries herself in books or she rides her bike or takes up origami.  She has such a nice time that we always think she’s learned some important lesson. _She_ always thinks she’s learned some important lesson!  But then it starts up all over again.”

“Does it make her happy?” Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle said.

The Beeker-Beckers thought of Colleen’s vexed uncertainty at not being able to choose a movie, her irritation at realizing her popsicle had melted, and her embarrassment when she had realized the people in the movie theater had been whispering about her.

“No,” Ms. Becker said.  “Not really. Not the way she’s going about it now.”

“It can be a hard thing for a child her age,” Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle said.  “They don’t know whether they’re coming or going, so they’re always trying to check.  But I think we can help her. I’m going to email you something you might call friendly malware.  Think of it like a vaccine—a little bit of a virus to stop you from getting infected more seriously.”

“Did she say malware?” Ms. Becker asked her husband.  She still remembered the heavenly-tasting toothpaste Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle had sent her parents and had been rather hoping Colleen’s cure would be something along those lines.  It seemed homier.

“Malware,” Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle confirmed.  “I do try to keep up with the times. Put the file on Colleen’s phone while she’s asleep.”

“If we can get it out from underneath her pillow,” Mr. Beeker said.

“I don’t think it will take more than a few days,” Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle said.  “Once the cure’s taken effect, you can remove the file yourselves, or call customer service to help you.  I’ve dealt with most of the major providers before.”

*

The next day, Colleen Beeker-Becker woke up and promptly reached for her phone.  First she checked the texts and status updates and tweets that had come in while she was sleeping.  Then she took a quiz about what kind of pancake topping she would be: syrup, very boring. She took it again and again until she got lingonberry, which seemed rare and interesting.  She posted the results on Facebook.

Then she took a picture of herself with her hair spread out all over her pillow.  This was called the mermaid look. If you had long, shiny hair, as Colleen Beeker-Becker did, and you took a picture of yourself with the mermaid look but with your eyes rolled, it meant that you were beautiful but also cool enough to not care.

Colleen did care.  She felt that she cared about everything.  She wanted to do everything exactly right.

But when she tried to upload the mermaid photo to Instagram, her app crashed.  She tried again. Another crash. Again. This time it let her get almost all the way through posting the photo and then froze.

It took Colleen twenty minutes to get the picture up the way she wanted it, and by then she was hungry—she had spent too much time reading about pancake toppings—and irritable.  She glared at her Instagram app and went out to go have breakfast.

Ms. Becker had already gone to work, but Mr. Beeker had taken the morning off to go to the dentist.

“Good morning, sweetheart,” he said in the hearty voice of a man trying very hard not to ask a question.

“Morning, Dad,” Colleen mumbled.

This was more of a greeting than he had gotten from her in ages.  He watched in awe as she pawed through the kitchen cabinets with inarticulate grunts of hunger.  It was like seeing a bear emerge from winter hibernation skinny and starving. He tentatively offered to make her French toast—Colleen used to love his French toast—and Colleen gratefully accepted.  This now, Mr. Beeker thought, qualified as an entire interaction. He whistled as he made the French toast.

Meanwhile Colleen, her temper assuaged by the smell of cinnamon and sweet batter, had gotten back on her phone.  Someone had put up a link to an article about thirty-seven childhood toys that only people of Colleen’s generation would know.  Colleen clicked.

She had only gotten through one of the toys on the list when the article redirected her to an ad.  She back-clicked and tried again. Childhood toys three and four were interrupted by a long, multi-screen invitation to sign up for daily emails.  By the time she had reached the bottom of the box to click no thanks, she was at childhood toy number seventeen and had to backtrack, but the moment she scrolled up, the invitation reactivated itself.

Colleen decided she was too young to have nostalgia.

She blinked.  There was French toast in front of her.  How long had it been there? And where had her father gone?

She felt a twist of sorriness in her stomach that her dad had made her a fancy breakfast—he had even sliced strawberries on top of the French toast—and she hadn’t even noticed enough to thank him or to say goodbye before he went to the dentist.  She glumly ate her French toast. It was still warm, so she hadn’t missed him by that much. She wished she hadn’t spent so much time trying to read that pointless article.

Her phone acted buggy all day.  It would work for a while—she would return a text or check a recipe for brownies she wanted to make and everything would be fine—but then it would start to crash or give her endless pop-ups.  It got so that almost everything was either a slog or so full of little interruptions that she couldn’t even keep track of what she was doing.

She tried restarting it.  No luck.

The Beeker-Beckers came home that night to find their daughter curled up on the sofa watching a movie with rapt attention.  Her phone lay abandoned on the cushion beside her.

Colleen paused her movie.  “Hi, Mom, hi, Dad. I made brownies.”

Ms. Becker sniffed the air, taking in the warm, chocolatey scent.  When was the last time Colleen had surprised them with anything? When was the last time they’d come home to find that she’d done anything at all?

The brownies were delicious.  They ate them out on the porch in the cool twilight, all three of them talking about how they were glad the worst of the heat was over.

“Maybe the worst of everything is over,” Mr. Beeker said with barely-concealed melodrama.

“We shouldn’t jump to any conclusions,” Ms. Becker said that night when she and Mr. Beeker went to bed.  “It’s only been a day.”

“When you think about it,” Mr. Beeker said, “it’s funny that we were so relieved to come home and see her looking at a _different_ screen.”

Ms. Becker chuckled.  “Our own parents would be horrified.  But I’ll take anything that’s not chopping her attention span into a thousand little pieces—especially if it’s something she can share with us.  I don’t remember the last time I had such a nice evening.”

“Now who’s jumping to conclusions?”

Ms. Becker turned off the lights.  “Let’s just hope neither one of us is.”

Of course, the next morning still began with Colleen reaching for her phone.  She had a text from Anastasia Lucia Couscous.

_where were u yesterday???_

She typed, _sry! my phone’s being weird._

When there was no answer right away, she wondered why she was still staring at the phone waiting for one.  Her friend might even still be asleep. Colleen’s text would be there for her when she woke up the way her friend’s two AM text had been there for her.  Texts waited, that was what made them better than silly old phone calls.

She slid her phone into her pocket, but the resolution to ignore it didn’t last long.  She felt an awful nagging sensation whenever she wasn’t checking up on what people were saying.  What if they were talking about her? What if she missed the chance to say something and it mattered?

Her phone didn’t seem to care about any of that.  It was up to yesterday’s tricks all over again.

It had even added a new one.  Now everything on YouTube forced her to scroll agonizingly slowly through the video’s comments section first, as though the website had been turned upside-down.

Also, a strange number of the comments had been replaced entirely with heart emojis, including comments made by people whose usernames-- _sucadic69_ \--suggested that they were not likely to favor the heart emoji.

It had to be some kind of strain on the processing power, Colleen decided.  She didn’t entirely know what that meant, but she thought it sounded good. The phone was just—stressed.  It had to be. After all, the longer she waited between bouts of checking it, the better it worked when she did.  And certain websites and apps—Buzzfeed, Facebook, Twitter, TMZ—seemed to strain it more than others. She’d have to get her parents to take her to the mall to get it looked at.

But for right now… Colleen was surprised to feel a funny kind of relief.  She didn’t have to be available. She didn’t have to check to see how many upvotes her decisions would get.  She didn’t have to comb her hair out perfectly straight for the mermaid pose. She could eat a messy, overflowing peanut butter and jelly sandwich with no #aesthetic at all.

She could do whatever she wanted.  She could even _want_ whatever she wanted.

*

The Beeker-Beckers were greeted at the front door by their daughter—at least, they were fairly sure it was their daughter.  Since she was covered head-to-toe in dust, it was somewhat hard to tell.

They didn’t even have time to exclaim over this before she grabbed them by the hands and began pulling them around.  “Mom, Dad, come on, I have to show you something.”

“The inside of the vacuum cleaner you just burst out of?” Mr. Beeker said.

Colleen tutted that question away.  She took them to the back of the house, to the little arts and crafts workroom that the Beeker-Beckers had made.

“These used to be the maid’s quarters back when the house was built,” she said importantly, like she was giving them a tour.  “I was poking around in here trying to use that old sculpting clay—it’s all dried out, Dad, we have to get more—and I started thinking about what a funny shape this room is.  Then I remembered you made it into a crafting room because it used to be the maid’s room and we—”

“Would never have a maid,” Mr. Beeker said.

“I always wanted a robot maid,” Ms. Becker said wistfully.  “I suppose we’ll have to be content with the Roomba.”

Colleen thought her parents were being very silly and distractible, but she decided to be generous and ignore it.  “Right. Well, in that movie I watched yesterday, all the housekeepers and butlers and everybody had secret little doors that they went through so they didn’t disturb the family.  Or the werewolf,” she added for the sake of accuracy.

“Is she old enough to watch werewolf movies?” Ms. Becker asked Mr. Beeker, pursing her lips.

“I’m not sure.  It doesn’t seem to have done her any harm.”

“You remember to put the parental controls on the internet and then you forget about the TV…  Our parents really _would_ be ashamed of us.”

Colleen cleared her throat.

They looked at her with surprise.  They had gotten so used to going off onto little tangents of their own, since Colleen had stopped paying attention to them, but here she was surveying them with her hands on her hips.

“It’s really rude not to listen when someone’s talking to you,” Colleen said.

The Beeker-Beckers apologized meekly.  Please, they urged her, continue.

“I was thinking about how much wallpaper this house had when we moved in.”

“Oodles,” Ms. Becker agreed.  “Hideous stuff.” They were still in the process of getting it all down and repainting the walls.

“And it’s gone in some places now, but you still haven’t stripped it off in here because no one ever _comes_ back here.”

Ms. Becker couldn’t be sure, but she thought her phone-obsessed daughter might be judging her for having too few hobbies and interests.  And it was true that it _had_ been a long time since she had sat down in the crafting room.  That make-your-own-jewelry kit looked suspiciously as though its plastic-wrap had never been removed.

“So I thought I’d strip off the wallpaper for you,” Colleen said, her eyes shining, “and I _found a secret door_.”

“You know how to strip wallpaper?” said Mr. Beeker, who unfailingly grabbed the wrong end of the point.

“I looked it up on my phone,” Colleen said, waving her hand, as if it didn’t matter how she had come by the information, since it was just a means to an end.  “I pasted the stuff back up—”

“I thought it was looking a little lumpy,” Ms. Becker said.

“—but it’s right here.  Look!” Colleen ripped a giant piece of wallpaper off the wall.

Ms. Becker had believed her, but seeing it was another thing entirely.  She actually gasped. “It’s like _The Secret Garden_!”

“I know!” Colleen said.  She bounced into her mom’s arms and hugged her.  “That’s what I was thinking of, too! It just opens up into the back stairwell, or into the wallpaper covering another _door_ in the back stairwell, anyway, but there might be other ones all over the place—or at least wherever you haven’t gotten the wallpaper off yet.  Little cubbyholes and cabinets that were built for people to overlook them. It’s like living in a haunted mansion!”

Mr. Beeker opined that if Colleen wanted to spend the rest of her summer vacation hunting for secret doors that was fine by him.  He certainly couldn’t _stop_ her from stripping away all the wallpaper left in the house.

“And if you want to hire painters too,” he added, “you go right ahead.”

“Dad,” Colleen said, pained, “please be serious.”

They spent the whole rest of the night tearing down wallpaper and counting up Victorian eccentricities they found.  There were things that hadn’t even been covered up that they still hadn’t noticed until they started looking for them: little gargoyles carved on the underside of the top shelf of the bookcase, a checkerboard tile that popped out to reveal a hiding place with an empty jewelry box in it, and even a dumbwaiter that they’d mistaken for an ordinary cabinet.

Exhausted, sweaty, and covered in dust, they all collapsed on the porch and ate popsicles for dinner to try to cool off.  Mr. Beeker considered whether or not they were all consuming too much sugar.

“This house might not have air conditioning,” Ms. Becker said, “but I think what we found today makes up for it.”

Colleen nodded, licking at her popsicle.  “I think I want to build houses when I grow up.  I’ll put in all kinds of secrets.” She leaned her head against Ms. Becker’s shoulder.  “I asked Anastasia Lucia if she wanted to come over tomorrow and help me explore. We put up a Facebook invite to see if anyone else wanted to come, too.  I’ll have to remember to check how many people RSVPed so I’ll know how many brownies to make.”

“Check it right now,” Ms. Becker said, “and I’ll go to the store and get you some more brownie mix if you need it.”

“Thanks, Mom, but I can always bike there tomorrow and get some if I have to.  I left my phone inside anyway, and I don’t want to go in just yet. It’s too nice out here.”

*

The Beeker-Beckers left the malware on Colleen’s phone for two more days and then quietly deleted the file during the night.

“I feel like a spy,” Ms. Becker whispered.

Mr. Beeker smiled.  “If you want, you can put on your trenchcoat while we Skype with Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle.  Or we can go to a park and meet her on a bench while we pretend to feed the birds.”

“You know, I think she’d do that if we wanted her to.  Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle always loved to play pretend. If I weren’t too tired out from helping Colleen make those wire bracelets for her friends, I’d ask her.”

When Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle answered their call, they rushed right away into thanking her.

“Colleen is back to being her old self, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle.  She’s funny and adventurous and she likes spending time with us, and she doesn’t seem so worried and distracted all the time.  She’s not on her phone any more than her friends are—actually, she’s on it much less, and she says they don’t mind. They adjusted.”

“Of course they did,” Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle said.  “Children are very adaptable. Why, they find ways to still be friends with Ezra Kwan, and his fathers keep chucking his phone in the lake.  The children and I go diving for them sometimes so they don’t hurt any of the plants or animals there. We are using the discarded screens to build a fish tank.”

Mr. Beeker was privately grateful that they lived just far enough away from Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle that Colleen wouldn’t be diving around in any muddy old lake searching for discarded cell phones, but he smiled and nodded a lot at this.

“It’s all about finding a happy medium,” Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle said.  “All children want their friends’ approval and none of them want to be bored.  When they have a way to try for both of those things all the time, of course they’re going to do it.  They just need a little push sometimes to move back towards knowing who they are without anyone’s help and being able to tolerate a little bit of quiet in their minds.  They’ll need that someday for their daydreams.”

Ms. Becker agreed enthusiastically.  “She’s gotten much more creative since she started putting her phone down sometimes.  And she always seems to have a plan in her head now. She wants to build houses when she grows up.”

“How fun!  Tell her to come by sometime and I’ll show her all the blueprints Mr. Piggle-Wiggle used to build our little home upside-down.  And she can help us put up a new treehouse.”

“We really can’t thank you enough, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle,” Ms. Becker said.

When they were back in bed, Mr. Beeker whispered, “Isn’t there some happy medium between Colleen always being on her phone and Colleen playing around with scrap lumber and rusty nails?”

Ms. Becker laughed softly.  “I wonder if Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle has an overprotective father cure.”

“ _I_ wonder if she has a putting-your-cold-feet-against-your-husband cure.”

“I’m sure it’s very much in demand,” Ms. Becker said.

 


End file.
